


wouldn't you like to see something strange?

by callunavulgari



Series: Dark Month Collection [75]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Genre: 31 Days Of Halloween, Alternate Universe - Nightmare Before Christmas Fusion, M/M, Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 21:48:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21088358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: “I’d say you make my heart pound, but well…” Stiles nods meaningfully to his chest, where if you look hard enough between the slots of his ribs, you can see the lump of muscle that once was his heart, pointedly not beating. “You know.”





	wouldn't you like to see something strange?

**Author's Note:**

> Day 17 of October. Written on the 18th, because yesterday I was updating my resume. Prompts were: a knock at the door, training, followed, message, “I’d say you make my heart pound, but well… you know,” skulls, and fang. I think that this is actually the most normal Nightmare Before Christmas AU I've ever written. Should have added more bugs. Alas.

Everyone in Halloween Town knows about the Hales. It’s hard not to talk about the second most reclusive family in a town where everybody knew everybody. Monsters like to gossip, and when you don’t know something, it’s easy to assume _everything_.

When Stiles was growing up, he used to haunt the woods near their house. It was a good haunting spot, and nobody was ever brave enough to get close, which made it even better. He could hoot and holler and the town kids would just assume that it was the Hales being the Hales.

He didn’t get a good look at Derek until he was already dead, which was a shame, because Stiles thinks that if he'd been alive when he'd met him, Derek Hale would have gotten his blood pumping good.

Derek was old werewolf stock, but where most of the werewolves around town looked like wolves walking around in cravats and long coats, Derek was sculpted a little bit funny. He didn’t have a muzzle for one, and his teeth were only scary when you got close enough to really see them. He wasn’t super hairy, and he didn’t have a tail. Most of the time, in fact, he looked strangely normal. Which in Halloween Town, was the strange part.

“Anyone ever tell you that you look like a human?” Stiles asks him, the first time he’s brave enough to do more than skulk and watch from afar.

Derek doesn’t look away from the wood he’s chopping. He doesn’t even say anything.

If Stiles’s dad were around that day, he probably would have groaned, because if there was one thing to be said about Stiles, it was this: ignoring him once would ensure that he followed you forever.

“Not talking,” Stiles hums, creeping closer. “I see.”

Derek’s face twists, and his blue eyes, burning in his sockets like embers, narrow.

Stiles is delighted.

“What do you want?” he says eventually, turning around with a huff. His claws are digging into the handle of the axe he’s holding.

Stiles shrugs. “Bored. Thought I’d make a little conversation.”

Stiles, see, _is_ typical monster stock. He’d come caterwauling out of his mother like a banshee, and when his parents had looked down at his gore streaked form, they had cooed.

“He takes after your father,” his dad had said proudly, because Stiles did.

His skull was shaped perfectly, and even with the skin still on him, you could see the contours of his skull, the hollows where his bones joined together, the void where his eyes should have been. His chest gaped open beneath transparent skin, and his family had known that he wouldn’t live long.

And he hadn’t. When he was six years old, his heart had just… stopped beating. His transparent skin sloughed off his bones, bits sticking between his knuckles for weeks before it all came off, like a lizard shedding its skin.

He wasn’t a perfect replica. His skull was too narrow. His fingers longer, almost claw-like at the pointed tips. But at six years old, he might as well have been _him_ in miniature.

Growing up in Halloween Town with the Pumpkin King for a grandfather was a little much. Everyone went on about _legacy_, gifting Stiles striped suits and pleading with him to join in on the festivities, because surely, _surely_ a monster who took after the legendary bone man would be just as much of a fright.

Stiles didn’t want it. His grandfather and grandmother were gone, vanished off to who knows where, and Stiles would not be anyone's replacement, no matter how legendary.

Maybe that’s why he envied the Hales so much. Their house was a ruin in the most _spectacular_ way and no one ever complained when they didn’t show up on Halloween.

“Don’t you have a hoard of friends you can bother?” Derek hisses, lips peeling back to show off an impressive row of sharp teeth.

Stiles did not have a hoard of friends to bother. He had one, and his name was Scott, and at that very moment he was probably warbling sonnets up to the window of the prettiest arachnid around. Stiles didn’t blame him. Much. Allison was graceful, deadly, and her eight beady eyes were very striking in such a pale, pointed face.

“Nope,” Stiles tells him, grinning wide.

He followed Derek around for weeks. It was the absolute best. Derek Hale, it turned out, could be more than just a normal looking guy if you pissed him off enough. The first time that Stiles had watched him shift, he’d been _fascinated_.

Derek as a monster was unexpected. His body turned itself inside out, flesh and muscle collapsing into a pile of steaming, bloody parts that rearranged themselves on the grass. And then those pieces would pull themselves back together differently, with four legs instead of two, a muzzle that peeled back to reveal terrifyingly sharp teeth. He loomed, higher and higher, a bulky black mass of backwards legs and silky fur and eyes that still burned in their empty sockets. When he was done changing, he made a noise that sounded like a chainsaw going off deep in his chest, and prowled forward.

It was supposed to be intimidating, but instead, Stiles had whooped in joy and swooped in, peeling back black gums so he could measure his teeth. Derek snapped at his wrist, but Stiles was too quick, crowing in delight and dancing away.

“I’ll bet you can’t catch me,” he’d grinned, and Derek made that chainsaw growl again and bounded after him.

Derek caught him. He caught Stiles by the back of his shirt and shook him like a rag doll, but Stiles was too busy laughing to be terrified.

When Derek finally dropped him, he’d spread out on the ground and said, “That was fun. We should do that again sometime.”

So they did. Every few days, Stiles would creep back onto Hale property, and Derek would come barreling out of the front door, already a mass of teeth and bone and fur. Sometimes he would catch Stiles. Sometimes, Stiles escaped, shrieking with laughter.

It took a couple months for anyone to catch on.

When Stiles came home one day with bite marks engraved into the bones of his forearm, his dad looked at them, cocked his head so hard that the crow sitting on it went tumbling right off, and said, “You can do better than a Hale, Stiles.”

Stiles frowned at him. “I don’t want to do better.”

That night, Stiles wakes up to a knock on his door. He’s expecting his dad, or maybe Scott, but instead, what he gets is Derek nudging through his door, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. Stiles sits bolt upright in bed, clutching his blankets in bony fingers.

“Did you just _sneak_ into my _house_?” Stiles breathes, absurdly charmed.

Derek’s in his human disguise, everything dangerous about him hidden away from view, lurking just under the surface. He gives Stiles a look, and says, “Don’t be weird about it.”

He shuts the door behind him.

“I’ve got a nice monster knocking on my door just before the witching hour,” Stiles tells him playfully, making room for Derek to take a seat next to him. “How am I not supposed to be weird about that?”

Derek does something akin to rolling his eyes, the flames doing a little shimmy around the circumference of his eye sockets. He leans back against Stiles’s headboard, seemingly unconcerned that their sides are pressed together. Derek’s skin is very warm, _human_ warm, and Stiles is all bones. He sucks up the warmth greedily.

“I’d say you make my heart pound, but well…” Stiles nods meaningfully to his chest, where if you look hard enough between the slots of his ribs, you can see the lump of muscle that once was his heart, pointedly not beating. “You know.”

Derek snorts, and there’s something almost like a smile playing around his lips.

“I came to give you a message,” Derek says, toying with the fabric of Stiles’s blanket. There are little bundles of spiders knitted onto it.

Stiles cocks his head. “A message?”

“It’s from my mom,” Derek mutters. “Something about Jack Skellington’s brood not being allowed on our land.”

Stiles barks a laugh. “So you’ve come to my house to tell me never to see you again?”

Derek does something then that Stiles has never seen him do before - he turns to Stiles, and _grins_, each and every tooth on display. He leans closer, until his strange human lips are right next to Stiles’s bony head. His voice is a growl, a reminder of what’s lurking under that skin. “I _came_ to tell you not to get _caught_ next time.”

Stiles grins back at him. “I can do that.”

“Good,” Derek tells him, and leans in, placing an odd little kiss right on Stiles’s bony lips. When he pulls back, he’s looking almost smug. “I’d hate for you to get scared away now.”

Stiles doesn’t have a heart that works anymore, but he thinks that if he did, it really _would_ be pounding. His grin pulls wider, and he knows who he looks like when he smiles like this, but Derek doesn’t seem to mind.

So Stiles makes his voice a little wicked, puts a little bit of that Pumpkin King flare on for show, and tells him, “I don’t scare easy.”


End file.
